The telecommunications industry presently offers a wide variety of telephony services to customers via telecommunications networks, providing wired or wireless access. In a fundamental role, the telecommunications networks interconnect one or more calling telephones to one or more called telephones. In implementing such interconnections, a calling telephone places a call via a communications channel through one or more central office or mobile telephone exchange switches. As used herein, “telephone” may refer to a station, wireless telephone, cellular or mobile telephone, PCS telephone, satellite telephone, wireline telephone, analog telephone, digital telephone, VoIP telephone, WiFi telephone communications device, or the like.
In the past, telecommunications networks employed a standardized ringback tone audible ring generation circuit within central office or mobile telephone exchange switches to apply an audible ringing signal to a communications channel to be heard by a calling party following dialing of digits and prior to answer by the distant end called party or an automated answering device. Such audible ringing was applied to the communications channel by the switching system at the end of the intended link connected via wireline or wireless methodologies from the telephone of the calling party to the telephone of the called party.
In more recent years, advances in intelligent peripheral systems for central office and mobile telephone exchange switches have enabled limited replacement of standardized ringback tone with other audio on telephone calls between an individual as a calling party and an individual as a called party using the called party's single wireless telephone line.
Conventional ringback tone replacement systems lack the functionality to rapidly replace a standardized ringback tone on entire trunk groups assigned to corporations that are directed at call centers. Present day systems for ringback audio replacement are further limited in that back-end components for interconnecting to the telephone network are always separate from front-end Internet accessible user interface components and billing system interface components. Such separate components are typically each supplied by different vendors with many unique interfaces.
A multitude of components from various vendors creates numerous difficulties in building and deploying a complete system. It is also a drawback of present day standardized ringback tone replacement systems that such systems are not designed with modularity in mind such that a set of modules can be economically configured for a small carrier and additional modules can be added and/or mixed and matched to provide economical centralized, regionalized, or distributed solutions for larger carriers.
Conventional ringback tone replacement systems also lack an architecture whereby multiple carriers can be serviced by one system. Additionally, present day systems for ringback audio replacement have limited features that are available. For example, providing ringback audio associated with the physical location of a mobile telephone customer is not possible in present day systems.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is a telephone communications system with improved ringback capabilities and a method of providing the improved ringback capabilities to calling parties.